The science sector sounds the alarm
New Zealand's science sector, once hailed for its agility and ingenuity during the pandemic and natural disasters, is now grappling with what researchers say is a crisis of confidence, fuelled by shrinking budgets, unstable funding pathways, and policy decisions that increasingly favour commercial returns over long-term public good.
Last month, a total of $212 million was cut from the science sector in this Budget, which reprioritises existing research funding towards commercially focused science and innovation.
A sizeable portion goes to Invest NZ and a new gene tech regulator.
The Government says it backs the sector and is prioritising industry partnerships, private-sector investment, and 'innovation outcomes with measurable economic impact.'
While officials insist the move reflects 'fiscal discipline and real-world alignment,' many in the sector say it amounts to a dismantling of the research base.
Newsroom political journalist Fox Meyer tells The Detail 'the scale of the cuts is not great for the sector, but it's also more about the lack of investment'.
'It's one thing to have cuts and reprioritisation, but people have been calling for more of just anything for some time now. Now, there is a lot of frustration.
'Science funding has been stagnant or declining for years now, and a decision to reprioritise stuff is not necessarily going to put money in the Government's pocket like they think.'
With a focus on the bottom line, is this the Government pulling off a Sir John Key 'show me the money' moment, with a scientific bent?
'That actually goes both ways,' says Meyer. 'Scientists are looking at the Government saying, 'Show me the money if you want me to produce more money', and the Government is looking back at the scientists and saying, 'Well, you show me the money, what are you bringing in, how are you lifting your weight?'.
'That is going to be a hard one to reconcile unless the Government is willing to pony up and make the investment.'
He worries the fall-out will include a 'brain drain' with our country's brightest and best scientists and researchers opting to take up positions overseas.
'My connections in the science world – plenty of them – have moved.
'The chief science adviser for the Department of Conservation has moved to Australia … that's an expert in a cutting-edge field that we have lost to a company in Australia.
'And it's not the only example of this sort of thing. We invest so much in training up these scientists, and they are very skilled scientists, and then to not give them what they are asking for and what they need, I feel it falls short of our own investment.'
In fairness, it is not all doom and gloom.
'So, the positives, there is a new funding pool for Māori-related science, that's a good thing. There's the sector-wide report that has come out, which has given us a good look at the sector. We know more now, that's a good thing. And the chief science adviser has been appointed, and the panel around him has been appointed, that's a good thing there.'
Meyer says the sector is crucial to all parts of New Zealand.
'The science sector is about answering questions. If you have questions, science is a method, and it is used to answer a lot of those questions … the more money that we put into this sector, the more questions we can answer. And the more questions we can answer, the more answers we can sell.
'If the Government is worried about economic growth, and they want to champion this sector, then you've got to put your money where your mouth is.
'I am going to be curious to see how they can steer the ship of science, when maybe what they are most suited for is selling the fruits of science.'
Check out how to listen to and follow The Detail here.
You can also stay up-to-date by liking us on Facebook or following us on Twitter.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Scoop
23 minutes ago
- Scoop
Rally Auckland 2pm To Protest Suspension Of 38 Disability Workers
What: Disability workers protest rally When: 2pm Sunday 8 June Where: Te Roopu Taurima Head Office, 650 Great South Road, Auckland Who: Speakers include PSA National Secretary Fleur Fitzsimons Disability workers will be making their concerns loud and clear at a rally today to protest the outrageous suspension without pay of 38 workers at disability residential care provider Te Roopu Taurima. Te Roopu Taurima o Manukau Trust is the country's largest kaupapa Māori community disability provider. It operates residential whare in Te Tai Tokerau/Northland, Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland, Waikato, Waitaha/Canterbury, and a residential mental health whare in Whangārei. The trust CE Karen Smith late on Friday afternoon gave notice of suspension of 38 workers who support people living at Te Roopu Taurima houses without pay for six weeks in response to low level strike action taken in support of their collective agreement. "This is an oppressive over-reaction designed to intimidate and bully these workers. It's unheard of for New Zealand employers to adopt such a hostile tactic in these circumstances," said Fleur Fitzsimons National Secretary Public Service Association Te Pūkenga Here Tikanga Mahi. "The strike action only involved not doing some tasks in order to try and put pressure on the employer to listen to these workers." "The trust has a vision to 'strive to place tāngata at the heart of our services', this shows the trust is not living its own values. "Many of these workers are Māori, Pasifika, and migrant workers who deserve fair wages and conditions." The action comes after Te Roopu Taurima tried to introduce harsh terms of employment including restrictions on secondary employment and 90 day trials as well as a pay increase that fails to meet the increased cost of living facing these workers and their whānau. The PSA and Te Roopu Taurima attended independent and confidential facilitation run by an Employment Relations Authority member in Auckland over four days. The Authority member then provided recommendations to settle the collective agreement. "The PSA did not get everything we wanted but nevertheless agreed that we would recommend the outcomes to our members. Te Roopu Taurima was still not satisfied though. "This is an insight into the future of industrial relations in New Zealand under this government. It has emboldened employers to try to take away the small number of remaining employment rights that working people have and use every underhand tactic they can to get there. "Workers and the community must stand up and fight back." Note The Public Service Association Te Pūkenga Here Tikanga Mahi is Aotearoa New Zealand's largest trade union, representing and supporting more than 95,000 workers across central government, state-owned enterprises, local councils, health boards and community groups.
Newsroom
32 minutes ago
- Newsroom
Let's call ‘taxing the rich' what it really is
Opinion: Last month the Government, under urgency, halted all pay equity claims thereby disproportionately affecting women who experience pay inequality. This is one of many policies that included gutting government departments and cutting public service spending to accommodate a massive wealth giveaway in the shape of tax cuts to landlords (a policy designed to supposedly stabilise rents but which seems to have had little impact). As reported in March last year, the tax giveaway to landlords is estimated to cost the country $2.9 billion. To put this in perspective, that is more than the amount paid in Treaty settlements since 1985, which is about $2.7b. In other words, in one year, the current Government awarded landlords more money than has been paid out to Māori in 40 years as compensation for historical wrongs. I note this to introduce my central concern that economic policy, as has been the case for the last four decades, is dominated by the central myth (now axiomatic for almost every government) that all our ills will be solved if we keep giving as much money as possible to the rich. This is based on three central assumptions of current economic dogma that those who question are branded as 'radical leftists'. These assumptions are underpinned by the beliefs that wealth trickles down; deregulation is good for business; and the state should stay out of the market and everything should be privatised. First, wealth, especially when given away in tax cuts, does not trickle down. It stays at the top. Ever-increasing wealth inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient or any study of income trends show this. Second, seen from a purely corporate perspective deregulation is no doubt a path to profit. However, it is also socially disastrous as costs of deregulation are outsourced via public bailouts following financial crises, for example, that are directly caused by the rolling back of legislation designed to safeguard the wider economy. Third, the state has always been an economic entrepreneur funding all kinds of technological innovation, such as the internet, but this often goes unreported in the dominant economic journalism. All this results in top-heavy, financially starved economies as governments continually try to make the wealth giveaways fit into a budget by stripping support for public services or selling off public assets at knockdown prices. (There is a tendency to undervalue the future social benefits of publicly owned resources.) Such sales are no more than an attempt to generate a short-lived financial hit that dissipates as quickly as the resources we all once owned. The fact that the global economic outlook as well as specific national economies remain so fragile and unstable, and are increasingly unable to secure the basic needs of their populations in terms of health, education and social support, is surely enough evidence that the principle of continually moving wealth upwards doesn't work, certainly not for society as a whole. However, because it has become communal liturgy, recited from almost every media pulpit for the last 40 years, it has become increasingly difficult to challenge. Just as there is no economic justification for structuring an economy in which only the very wealthy are the true beneficiaries, there is also no moral justification. From inside this dogma, the moral justification has always been that it is the rich in the form of investors and entrepreneurs that are the only wealth creators, and so they deserve to reap the wealth they create. But you only have to see the collapse in wealth creation during the pandemic when workers could not work, to know that workers also create wealth. Yet many are told they do not even deserve a living wage. Supressed wages is of course one way to structure an economy (there is no such thing as 'the' economy, by the way) to ensure wealth moves upwards. This results in a phenomenon called corporate welfare where the state has to step in to pay benefits to allow workers to actually live. What this means is that the money taxpayers pay out in social welfare is really a direct contribution to shareholder dividends. Welfare often compensates for the company not paying enough to workers so it can pay more to investors. This is another example of the outsourcing of problems for which the government picks up the tab. Just as the Joker begrudgingly loves Batman for maintaining the order he gets to break, the neoliberals love the government because they know it will be compelled to bail them out – a phenomenon known as the 'Greenspan Put' named after the US Fed chair who first bailed out the banks in 1987. Tax breaks are, of course, the main way to benefit the wealthy by directly increasing the wealth they keep and by breaking the public purse and public services. This then opens up new opportunities for privatisation and profit that will benefit a very small group. And I haven't even mentioned our non-existent capital gains tax. The assault on the Te Tiriti ō Waitangi is another example of efforts to structure an economy to favour the wealthy. Aside from the persistence of a colonial mentality hostile to all things Māori, Te Tiriti remains a firm barrier to expanding corporate appropriation of public resources. Should the Regulatory Standards Bill get passed (another piece of legislation aimed at weakening democratic control of resources and opening them up to private exploitation), Te Tiriti will be all that protects us. As our society is placed under increased stresses and strains beneath the extreme weight of amassed, socially useless wealth that sits with a very small class of people, there have been increased calls to tax the rich. I think we need a different slogan. In keeping with the dogma, conservative supporters have made tax a dirty word. Rather than tax being an individual or corporate contribution to the maintenance of a functioning society, the corporatist right has over the past four decades tried to make it a synonym for theft. The idea that taxing the rich is really a form of theft also makes it easy for the dogmatists to present the call as a form of envy; a petty resentment of the successful. Instead of a call to 'tax the rich', the call should be to 'reclaim the wealth'. I believe this phrase more adequately represents the request to return a greater share of what was commonly created. It is also a call to give back even just a small amount of what was taken through the design of an economy knowingly and carefully organised to purposefully benefit the few. Even if the progenitors of the dogma genuinely thought it would be a social good, which is hard to believe because they themselves do not believe in society, there is no reason to believe the fantasy now.
Scoop
3 hours ago
- Scoop
Kenya: UN Expert Urges Immediate Halt To Land Demarcation Violating Ogiek Rights And African Court Judgments
GENEVA (4 June 2025) – A UN expert* today expressed grave concern over the ongoing land demarcation by the Government of Kenya in the Eastern Mau Complex, which threatens ancestral lands of the Ogiek Peoples and contravenes binding judgments of the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights (AfCHPR). 'These actions risk causing irreparable harm to the Ogiek's land rights, which have been unequivocally upheld by the African Court,' said Albert K. Barume, Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples. 'I urge the Government of Kenya to immediately cease all activities that undermine the Ogiek's rights and to fully comply with the Court's rulings.' Despite the AfCHPR's 2017 and 2022 judgments affirming the Ogiek's ownership of their ancestral landsand requiring their restitution, the Kenyan Government has yet to take any actions to return Ogiek lands. A hearing scheduled for November 2024 was postponed at the State's request and is now set for June 2025. In September 2024, Kenya's Environment and Land Court in Nakuru dismissed the Ogiek's claims to their ancestral lands in East Mau, contradicting the AfCHPR's decisions. Meanwhile, from December 2024 to April 2025, the Government convened a series of public forums to discuss how to implement the Nakuru court ruling, criticised as exclusionary and politically driven. These culminated in a rushed demarcation process beginning on 25 April 2025, without the necessary consultations with Ogiek Peoples. 'The demarcation threatens the rights of more than 8,500 Ogiek people in Nessuit, Mariashoni, and Sururu, and endangers ecologically sensitive areas vital for water catchment sustainability,' Barume said. On 6 May 2025, the President of Kenya issued a 250,000-acre land title deed for parts of the Maasai Mau Forest to Narok County, further alarming the Ogiek of Sasimwani, who remain displaced following the 2023 forced evictions of over 700 families. 'We call on Government, all states institutions and Indigenous Peoples to engage in dialogue grounded in mutual respect and human rights,' the Special Rapporteur said. He expressed readiness to visit Kenya to support efforts toward a just and rights-based resolution in line with the AfCHPR's judgments.
